Others have probably been discovered by isolated gamers, who exploit their benefits while the dev squad and greater community remain oblivious.

I'n the vast, chaotic and murky realms of the abys... I mean the MoBA communities, there is a common understanding. The answer to the question "Who is the best player of hero X?" or even "Who is the best player in the world?" at any given time is most likely - "Some random pubstomper noone's ever heard of".

And well, as a veteran of the beta test I have nothing but praise for you guys in terms of coming up with the solutions to various power issuess over time. Well, since you guys have insider info on stuff, and you made everything, it could be expected that the way you approach a pottential tweak is going to be vastly more informed than any suggestion put forward by players as to how deal with a particular problem. But even with full awareness of that, you still did stuff which awed and impressed me over the years and for what my praise is worth, you have it.

I'm personally hoping for a bit of a tweak patch sometimes in the future. Stuff like stacking damage on orcs was shut down just so people stop obsessing with it and test other stuff out, and while that particular instance was likely a correct long term call - there's likely ones who could do with a bit of adjusting.

I'm also interested, in case a tweak patch happens, to see the blog writeup on "why is a single player game having a balancing patch". I've seen various reasons and interpretations of balance in the game, wrote some myself, and they run the gamut of "make everything broken!" to "make everything vanilla!", and I'm curious about what you guys would put out as a statement on why there needs to be balance if you decided to do something like that.

Very nice read. Desktop Dungeons has always me by the level of depth and strategy present in a single-player game, and the fact that there are always new and unusual combos to try (even if there are some very reliable fallbacks).

Nice read and it's one of the real pleasures of the game as a longish-time beta tester to find or learn from others tricks and strats I'd not thought about and to have so much uniqueness and depth in playing each dungeon.

Truely a nice read.In my opinion the awesome think about DD is, that at the first look it is a rather simple game. But all the mechanics interact so nicely into each other, so there are many options and different strategies.

One thing i'm looking forward is this:

Some secrets are known internally by QCF, discovered by accident or placed deliberately, waiting for the player community to find and use them.

Well, it sort of stands to reason that there'd be stuff in there the devs have planted and know about, but it takes a while to discover them. They've done a great job of being patient and silent about these things, sometimes even too good

They had a strat of subtly buffing stuff to make it more interesting to see what it would take to get someone to figure things out. This worked out fabulously in some cases, but what had happened a few times was that a degenerate strat would pop up and be so reliable/fun that people would simply not look elsewhere. You might remember me gushing about the cydstep halfling a few days ago? Back when you didn't need halflings for it, it was sort of obscuring a million things that were slowly getting more and more powerful but just weren't getting enough testers/vets to really ride them out and agree "yes, this is indeed too damned reliable".

Once you discover a reliable strat it can be really difficult to not simply prep it anywhere where you'd be facing more challenge than you really want when you sit down to play a run or two.

As a community we've had a few moments where giving up on a beloved and reliable fallback / bad habit opened up huge vistas while we scrambled for new discoveries to fill up the hole. It's the reason we're (or some of us are) so open handed with the terms like "ridiculous" or "broken" or "silly" - it was at times more important to cover as much ground as possible, rather than feeling smug and pro about in game scuessess. To think up reasons not to prep 5 advanced potions and a tri-sword everywhere. Personal reasons.

As an example, the sucess of the cydstep rogue, not necessarily overuse of that exact archetype but the lvl-catapult / potions spike logic behind it, was influencing the general opinion on "what's powerful". Furthermore, a newbie asking how to unlock monster classess, beat the vicious dungeons with 3 classess, would likely be given advice that included strategies which rely on restarting a run untill you've jacked the RNG to give you an element that probably wasn't ment to be readily available on every run. So on a certain level, when asking - what's supposed to be the top plateau of skill? - a newbie was likely to get a reply that equated to "you have to mechanicaly break the rules".

And you didn't, really. What was planted by the devs at the time was all sorts of stuff which was way more powerful and reliable than the cydstep rogue. Waaaaaay more. Tikki Tooki had a boon which gave you unlimited poison strike, which could precisely be desribed as... well, as a hack. For 50 piety, whatever you were fighting simply didn't regenerate health (which is why vets are loath to advocate rebuffing it, and maybe the potential for me to freak out, which I wouldn't but you can't be too careful). The basic items, the ones which didn't need unlocking, steadily got better and better cost/CP ratios and the sensation stone was twice as powerful as it is now - the CP monster strat was there for us to discover for quite a while.

Then there were several times when Vicious Gaan'Telet seemed undoable just to turn out very, very doable if you could do a perspective shift. It wasn't doable with the cydstep rogue or a warlord, but a monk... This guy subanark, he took a monk to VGT and beat it clueing us to just how powerful resistances were. Then we mapped out all the ways you could stack them on non-monks and all the stuff that had sinergy with it and we were beating a place that originally "noone was ment to get anywhere in". The devs sort of put it there as an unsolvable puzzle to keep us busy while they went to an expo or something, and we spent the "holliday" tearing it apart with all the cheeze which they planted earlier trying subtly to get us to shift attention.

So, every time you see something you don't know what you'd do with, or that makes no sense, there's a good chance that it's just not obvious or part of a potentially busted scheeme. Just the most recent discovery made me giddy as a schoolgirl - Naga Cauldron HAD to be about something, all the other Vicious rewards were powerfull and it seemed incredibly useless. And then it turns out that what it does, among other things, is turn anyone into a warlord. And I even seem to recall that when we wondered about how you're supposed to take a warlord through VGT that the devs even said "halfling and EM shennanigans" or someting like that which seemed to be TT level trolling at the time XD

Or your own recent frustration at being saddled with the impossibly gimpy task of having to do a PQI parched halfling run. You grumble about it assuming you're a smart guy who wouldn't miss something as big as that, but you get the three guys with the most posts go "what do you mean, parched halfling is a strat, not a limitation" If it's any comfort, I've been in that situation many times, but the game has managed to humble even the most confrontational of us.

I bet there's more stuff that we're yet to discover. I bet there's more stuff even for the devs to discover. Best game ever